If you were looking for talent would you look at the gym, the bank or in church?

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One of the more popular definitions of the word talent at Urbandictionary relates to a young woman’s looks.

Checking out the local talent is an expression dating from the days of the grandparents of most Urbandictionary users and was adopted in the 1940s.

But etymologically, appreciating the talents of members of the opposite sex might actually relate to whether they are overweight or not; or perhaps how rich they are.

The word comes from Greek where it referred to a scale or balance as well as the weight that might be placed on that balance. Then it was applied to a specific weight, although that varied from place to place and time to time sometimes being 30 kilograms, sometimes 40, other times, other weights.

Since scales or balances were mainly used in financial transactions a talent later became a unit of currency and it’s with these two meanings that the word it first entered Old English.

The Old English talent had come via Latin and being Latin the word arrived again through French after the Norman Conquest this time with a new meaning that had developed as French was emerging out of its Latin roots.

This new talent meant a person’s “will” or “state of mind” but this meaning too was swept away in the currents of time when the word began appearing in English translations of the Bible. In those translations a talent was again a piece of money since the Bible story harkened back to times when that was in fact the case.

But Bible stories are told for their allegorical value and the Parable of the Talents was one of these.

In that story a master gives his three servants some talents—being pieces of money—which two of them invest and earn interest but the third effectively hides under his mattress. The moral of the story being that you’ve got to use the talents you’ve been given in this life—which is what gave the word talent the meaning we understand today.